This invention relates to natural language processing and, more specifically, to computerized processing of natural-language phrases found in medical/clinical data.
Clinical information as expressed by health care personnel is typically provided in natural language, e.g., in English. But, while phrases in natural language are convenient in interpersonal communication, the same typically does not apply to computerized applications such as automated quality assurance, clinical decision support, patient management, outcome studies, administration, research and literature searching. Even where clinical data is available in electronic or computer-readable form, the data may remain inaccessible to computerized systems because of its form as narrative text.
For computerized applications, methods and systems have been developed for producing standardized, encoded representations of clinical information from natural-language sources such as findings from examinations, medical history, progress notes, and discharge summaries. Special-purpose techniques have been used in different domains, e.g., general and specialized pathology, radiology, and surgery discharge reports.
Of particular further interest is a general approach which is based on concepts and techniques described in the following papers:
C. Friedman et al., "A Conceptual Model for Clinical Radiology Reports". In: C. Safran, ed., Seventeenth Symposium for Computer Applications in Medical Care, New York, McGraw-Hill, March 1994, pp. 829-833;
C. Friedman et al., "A General Natural-Language Text Processor for Clinical Radiology", Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Vol. 1 (April 1994), pp. 161-174;
C. Friedman et al., "A Schema for Representing Medical Language Applied to Clinical Radiology", Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Vol. 1 (June 1994), pp. 233-248;
C. Friedman et al., "Natural Language Processing in an Operational Clinical Information System", Natural Language Engineering, Vol. 1 (March 1995), pp. 83-106.